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Tuesday, July 31, 2012

`From Light and Not From Primal Dark'

“The
great artist always gets right to the heart of the matter. His technique is so
natural it’s invisible or unhearable. I’ve always had good facility, and that
worries me. I hope it doesn’t get in the way.”

The
speaker is jazz pianist Bill Evans as quoted by Peter Pettinger in Bill Evans:How My Heart Sings (Yale University Press, 1998). His anxiety about
technique is typical. In Pettinger’s words, Evans was both “a supremely natural
pianist” and “the most self-critical of artists.” Decades of heroin addiction ended
his life in 1980 at age fifty-one, yet Evans’ tone when playing was notably clear
and warm, gentle and often classically elegant. That he and Glenn Gould were
correspondents and mutual admirers is hardly surprising. The lines quoted above
are preceded by this passage in which the pianist describes his fondness for
William Blake:

“He’s
almost like a folk poet, but he reaches heights of art because of his
simplicity. The simple things, the essences, are the great things, but our way
of expressing them can be incredibly complex. It’s the same thing with
technique in music. You try to express a simple emotion—love, excitement,
sadness—and often your technique gets in the way. It becomes an end in itself
when it should really be only the funnel through which your feelings and ideas
are communicated.”

Evans
must have had Songs of Innocence and Experience in mind, not Vala, orThe Four Zoas. “Simple” is a complicated
idea, and never simplistic, and Blake is not the first poet who comes to mind
when judging “simplicity.” Rather, I think of Robert Herrick, George Herbert or
Helen Pinkerton. Each, when crafting a poem, knows his or her subject. They
leave no room for muddiness or confusion. Their lines
read as though illuminated. Intentional mystification is an artistic failing
rooted in egotism, not profundity. Take the first two stanzas of
Pinkerton’s “Celebration” (Taken in
Faith: Poems, 2002):

Profundity
of thought – here, the scene in which “being and essence shine” -- coupled with
clarity of means is always rare, virtually nonexistent in contemporary poetry.
One of the reasons Helen’s poems reward repeated reading is their luminosity,
the opposite of so much pseudo-profundity. To her poem Helen adds an epigraph,
“Lumen de lumine,” from the Nicene Creed: Deum de Deo lumen de lumine Deum
verum de Deo vero (“God from God, light from light, true God from true
God.”)

1 comment:

G.K. Chesterton makes a similar point about Blake: that the Poetical books are far superior to the Prophetical ones. In an essay on Blake, GKC wrote: "No one who really understands Imagination, or how near it seems to Inspiration, would hesitate to give pages of the rambling epics about Albion and Urizen, for four lines like these . . .

How the Chimney-sweeper's cryEvery black'ning church appals;And the hapless soldier's sighRuns in blood down Palace walls."

Unfortunately, I spent dreary summer school days in graduate school listening to the professor's eye-glazing theories about Albion and Urizen. I was saved by meeting my future wife in the class; we promptly dropped the course, and the summer improved immeasurably. J.D. Flanagan